A strange thing happened......

Well it struck me today that I've gone about this in the wrong way. I should have started at the begining which is always a good thing. Anyway, the boat. I had my first narrowboat sometime ago, and bar a couple of incidents, I have to be honest and say they were happy times. Then I had a 'sensible' thought. I thought ''You're too old for this Paul. Get back on land!'' So I did. What a mistake. I knew the moment I agreed the sale it was the wrong thing to do. Hundreds of hours of work gone in a handshake. So I moved back onto dry land and felt disorientated for the first 6 months. This was put down to the non-movement of the house. Nomatter what anyone says, even narrowboats move gently. On top of that there were the months of shattered sleep. I could not for the life of me get a decent nights sleep on land. See, its the boat movement gently rocking you off to sleep. It's only slight but the effect is there. So after a couple of years I decided I wanted another narrowboat....and here we are,at the begining, where I should of started in the first place.
So I trawled all the usual magazines and sites for ages and ages. I asked people if they knew of any boats for sale, and this side of my search plan was based on that old thing that people say after you aquire something. You know it. ''If only you said. Charlie was trying to sell his for ages and gave it away in the end.'' Well you guessed it. Charlie wasn't in the market to sell anything at the time. So it was auction site time. Evilbay was searched and searched and the watched list grew longer and longer with boats seemingly fetching sums that would embarass a Columbian drug cartel or even a footballer. Eventually I saw one. This little thing had had thousands spent on it. The then owner had run out of time and money so what was effectively a new painted, insulated shell was available for what seemed to be reasonable money. So I watched, and I watched until the last few minutes and a sum of cash the size of a developing country's national debt was bid. I had lost it. Still there would be others. And there were. Boats fitted out with full size sofas and huge domestic fridge freezers were 10-a-penny. I went and looked at boats that were denying the laws of physics just by floating. I kept trawling Evilbay and one day, the boat I had missed was relisted. Wasteing no time I contacted the vendor to arrange a meeting. I travelled to Lichfield to view and wasn't disappointed. The boat was exactly as described. After much haggling a price was agreed and the boat was mine. And that is the start of the saga in some sketchy detail but nonetheless documented.

The boat is named.

'Eleana' is officially named.

The boat gets ballast and a floor.

Well I started this in December 2009 and seemed to struggle a bit. Having been diagnosed as Bipolar with traces of SAD, winter can take its toll. I don't mind the cold, it's the constant grey and the short short days and long nights. Anyway, once the floods has passed, the process of fitting out began. The plank floor was put down after the ballast in the form of broken slabs. Here's my first tip. Visit your local builders merchant and ask about broken slabs. They can't sell them and generally pay to have them removed. Speak to them nicely, buy the coffees and you never know! With the flooring down and screwed to the batton bearers, the boat suddenly looked less daunting then before. This is a really important job. Get it done as quickly as possible. You'll feel you've achieved something which is really important as you have a very long way to go still. I enhanced this 'feel-good' factor several fold by lighting the woodburner and burning off-cuts. Nothing matches the smell of a woodfire, and with an old copper kettle constantly on the boil for tea and the sun streaming in through the windows life is suddenly very very good. I'll start posting photos soon. Cheers!

In the begining.....

Well now here's a thing. Me doing a blog, or at least the start of one. I'm not really sure what I'm going to cover in this blog, or indeed the frequency of said but we can only try. Not sure what the motivation for this is. I doubt that anyone is actually that interested in what I have to say or what I get up to. I also doubt that anyone is really that interested in my darker side, and, before you throw your hands up in horror, everybody has one. Some choose to ignore it at their peril, others give way to it entirely and live either a full and balanced life or live through rounds of chaos. Not sure which I am at the moment. I'm hoping that mine will be balanced, but who knows. I guess time will tell. What is the dark side? Well it's nothing frought with demons and goblins, not as far as I've experienced anyway. It's the side of you that sits there and whispers in your mind one day, ''What if I.....''. I guess most of us can fill in the blank with something or other. My plan over the next 12 months is to indulge my darker side and hopefully learn something from it and those I encounter. You're probably now asking, ''Why the title?''. Well, I'll hopefully chronical the building of a narrowboat, the name of which has not been thought of as yet. I'm hoping that some of this info and the pictures may prove useful to anyone else going down the same path. Cars? I like off-road vehicles and the places they can take you if you have a sense of adventure. And they make pretty good vans too if you're building a boat. And ''Pains''? Well I think that's self explanatory. Having built a boat before and spent lots of time stuck in the mud I think I can document these. I hope to add some pictures in the next few days and hope also that some of my efforts prove to be useful to someone.